"Novell on Mar. 1 announced preliminary financial results for its 2007 fiscal year first quarter, showing net revenue of USD 230 million. The first quarter's revenue represented a decline of USD 12 million, or about 5 percent, from the prior year's first quarter revenue of USD 242 million. Despite the unexceptional overall results during the first fiscal quarter 2007, however, Novell reported USD 15 million of revenue from Linux Platform Products, up 46 percent year-over-year, and USD 91 million of invoicing, up a whopping 659 percent year-over-year. Linux - make no doubt about it - is Novell's future."

Going for .NET and the whole mono enchilada, with the attendant performance and legal issues. Without mono, the deal with Microsoft may have never happened.

Hmm, the legal issues aren't the big problem; the big problem is the continual payments required to Microsoft from the Linux camp - but the person to blame for bringing dot net to Linux isn't Novell or Ximian; the bringing of dot net to Linux was merely a biproduct of Sun unwilling to opensource Java with its list of lies and excuses as to why they couldn't do it.

If there wasn't the issue with Sun and Java was opensource, the need to bring dot net to Linux would never have existed and Novell would have spent time along with Red Hat creating Java bindings for GNOME based technologies along with making SWT-GTK the default Java widget set for GNOME development.

The irony of the whole thing, Beagle was a port of an existing Java product that was adapted to mono and GNOME - so we would have gotten many of the features we see today except running on some sort of enhanced version of Java which included shared VM and the likes.

Regarding the performance hit of VM based software as bought up in your post; there is nothing wrong with VM based software, its benefits in regards to speeding up software development, improved stability and security - Lotus Notes 8.0 which is in development and based on on the Eclipse framework is an awesome application and definately defuses any 'Java is crap for general purpose applications'.

Java doesn't suck; Swing sucks, and the horse that is constantly beaten by Sun isn't going to correct the situation; SWT-GTK should ultimately be the defacto standard widget kit for Java development IMHO, it integrates well with *NIX GNOME desktop.

One (or a couple) bad experience with Java shouldn't be used as a benchmark as to whether the idea of Java persay is a good framework for GNOME or whether Mono is.